Remembering Reaganby Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissmanwww.dissidentvoice.org
June 11, 2004

R

onald
Reagan was a paradigm shifter.

He was what Charles Derber
in his new book,
Regime Change Begins at Home, calls a "regime-changer," moving
decisively to end the flagging New Deal era and launching the modern period
of corporate rule.

Reagan changed the
framework of expectations. He called into question a lot of things that had
been taken for granted (such as the obligation of the government of the
richest country in history to take care of its poorest people), and made it
possible to consider things which had previously seemed unthinkable (for
example, cutting the knees out from the powerful U.S. labor movement.)

Reagan was indeed a
historic figure, and his death deserves the massive media attention it is
receiving. But the odes to his cheerfulness and optimism should be replaced
with reflections on how his policies destroyed lives. Pacifica Radio's
Amy Goodman has
appropriately titled her retrospective coverage of the Reagan era
"Remembering the Dead."

The standard commentaries
recall Iran-contra as a blotch on the end of Reagan's presidency, but the
incident was trivial compared to the long list of administration crimes and
misdeeds, among them:

1. Cruelly slashing the
social safety net. Reagan cuts in social spending exacerbated a policy of
intentionally raising the unemployment rate. The result was a huge surge in
poverty. With homelessness skyrocketing, Reagan defended his
administration's record: "One problem that we've had, even in the best of
times, and that is the people who are sleeping on grates, the homeless who
are homeless, you might say, by choice."

2. Taking the world to the
brink of nuclear war. Reagan's supposed contribution to the downfall of the
Soviet Union was a military spending contest that drove the USSR into
economic collapse. Neglected in most present-day reminiscences is that this
military spending spree nearly started a nuclear war. Development and
deployment of a host of nuclear missiles, initiating Star Wars, acceleration
of the arms race – these led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move
its Doomsday Clock in 1984 to three minutes to midnight.

3. A targeted tax cut for
the rich. The 1981 tax cut was one of the largest in U.S. history and
heavily targeted toward the rich, with major declines in tax rates for
upper-income groups. The tax break helped widen income and wealth inequality
gaps. As David Stockman admitted, one of its other intended effects was to
starve the government of funds, so as to justify cuts in government spending
(for the poor -- the cash crunch didn't restrain government spending on
corporate welfare).

4. Firing striking air
traffic controllers. Reagan's decision to fire 1,800 striking air traffic
controller early in his term sent a message that employers could act against
striking or organizing workers with virtual impunity.

5. Deregulating the Savings
& Loan industry, paving the way for an industry meltdown and subsequent
bailout that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

6. Perpetrating a bloody
war in Central America. The Reagan-directed wars in El Salvador, Guatemala
and Nicaragua submerged Central America in a climate of terror and fear,
took tens of thousands of lives, destroyed a democratic experiment in
Nicaragua, and entrenched narrow elites who continue to repress the poor
majorities in the region.

7. Embracing South Africa's
apartheid regime (Said Reagan in 1981, "Can we abandon this country [South
Africa] that has stood beside us in every war we've ever fought?" He
followed up in 1985 with, "They have eliminated the segregation that we once
had in our own country.") and dictators worldwide, from Argentina to Korea,
Chile to the Philippines.

8. Undermining health,
safety and environmental regulation. Reagan decreed such rules must be
subjected to regulatory impact analysis -- corporate-biased cost-benefit
analyses, carried out by the Office of Management and Budget. The result:
countless positive regulations discarded or revised based on
pseudo-scientific conclusions that the cost to corporations would be greater
than the public benefit.

9. Slashing the
Environmental Protection Agency budget in half, and installing Anne Gorsuch
Burford to oversee the dismantling of the agency and ensure weak enforcement
of environmental rules.

10. Kick-starting the era
of structural adjustment. It was under Reagan administration influence that
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank began widely imposing the
policy package known as structural adjustment -- featuring deregulation,
privatization, emphasis on exports, cuts in social spending -- that has
plunged country after country in the developing world into economic
destitution. The IMF chief at the time was honest about what was to come,
saying in 1981 that, for low-income countries, "adjustment is particularly
costly in human terms."

11. Silence on the AIDS
epidemic. Reagan didn't mention AIDS publicly until 1987, by which point
AIDS had killed 19,000 in the United States. While the public health service
advocated aggressive education on prevention, Reagan moralists like
Secretary of Education Bill Bennett insisted on confining prevention
messages to abstinence.

12. Enabling a corporate
merger frenzy. The administration effectively re-wrote antitrust laws and
oversaw what at the time was an unprecedented merger trend. "There is
nothing written in the sky that says the world would not be a perfectly
satisfactory place if there were only 100 companies, provided that each had
1 percent of every product and service market," said Reagan's antitrust
enforcement chief William Baxter.

The Reagan administration
didn't succeed at imposing all of his agenda. But even Reagan's failures had
paradigm-shifting impacts. Among policies he sought but failed to impose
were: eliminating the Consumer Product Safety Commission, consummating an
unprecedented giveaway of coal mining rights on federal land, and stripping
benefits from thousands of recipients of Social Security disability (a move
ultimately counteracted by the courts).

It's important to remember
Reagan all right, but let's remember him for what he did, not for his
ability to deliver a scripted line. Ronald Wilson Reagan played up and
exacerbated economic and racial divisions, and he left the country, and the
world, meaner and more dangerous.